Excalibur 51/Excalibur_51_cd.bin/cap/tutorial/t_retail.tut

Text File | 1995-08-09 | 18KB | 478 lines

WELCOME TO CAPITALISM! In this lesson, you will learn how to set
up a department store to sell products. You will also see some of
the information reports that let you assess your success in the
market.

In this tutorial, the following hot keys are available:

[Esc]              - Quit the tutorial.
[Back Space] - Go back one tutorial step.

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First we need to introduce you to the game controls. Look at
the regional map window. The world in Capitalism is generated
randomly, so it is different in each game.

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The words on the map are city names. As in the real world,
business prospers where people come together. The cities will be
where most of your business activities take place.

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Notice the highlight box in the regional map.

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The area surrounded by the highlight box is magnified in the
detailed map window.

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mouse : left single
You can click any area of the regional map to show that area in
the detailed map.

Try clicking here.

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You can also scroll the detailed map by using the scroll bars at
the sides of the window or by right-clicking on a site in the map to
center it on that spot.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the world, it's time
for you to build your first company.

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mouse : left single
Click the Build button.

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These are types of firms that you can build in Capitalism.

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A department store is the easiest to set up and operate, so that is
where you will start.

The location of the department store can greatly influence its
profitability. Here are a few suggestions for a good department
store site.

- Select a city with sufficient population to support
   strong sales.
- Building the firm near the city center will attract
   more customers.

Remember though, that a good location always has a higher land
cost.

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wait       : 20,400
checkpoint : 1
Now choose a location for your department store in the detail window.

Click the "Continue Tutorial" button when you've made your decision.

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The cost to build this store is shown here.

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You have $10,000,000 cash and can afford it without difficulty.

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mouse : left single
Now press the "Build" button to build your first firm.

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mouse : left single
Congratulations! You have just set up your first department
store. Now click the Information button to look at your company.

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This is a picture of the interior of your department store.

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This is the logo of your company. In the tutorial, we have selected
the logo for you. In a real game, you can select your logo from a
list of choices.

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This is your portrait. It doesn't look like you? Don't worry,
you can select it in a real game, too.

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This area shows some key information about your department store.

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This is the revenue graph for your company. It has no revenue yet, but
we will take care of that in a few moments.

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This area shows the goods that your department store is selling,
none currently. But we are going to add some soon.

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mouse : left single
Click the "Layout" button to see the internal layout of your company.

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There are nine slots here. Each slot represents a space where you can
set up a business functional unit.

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mouse     : left double
checkunit : 1, 10L
Let's set up a purchasing unit right now. Double-click on this
slot.

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This is your purchasing unit and these are your employees. You
have just created jobs for the city. We and the mayor of the
city thank you for your contribution.

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mouse     : left double
checkunit : 2, 12
You also need to set up a sales unit. Double-click on this slot, and select
a sales unit.

Now you have both the purchase and sales units. But you still need
to tell the workers in the purchasing unit to move the purchased
goods to the sales unit.

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mouse : left double
Link these two units together by switching on the linkage line
between them.

Double-click on this line.

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mouse : left single
Now, your company is ready to operate and earn some money. Let's
purchase some goods from outside suppliers, which in turn will be
sold to the customers.

Click the purchasing unit.

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mouse : left single
Next, click the "Link Supplier" button.

In Capitalism, you can produce goods locally or import them from
overseas countries. At the beginning of the game, there aren't
too many good local suppliers yet, so we will import some goods.

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mouse : left double
In this tutorial, the government has built two seaports. One supplies
consumer goods and the other supplies raw materials.

Double-click here to highlight the seaport.

action: next_day
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These are the products available from the seaport. Before picking a
product, you must consider several factors. The most important are
price, quality, and brand.

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The price is shown here, but our total cost also includes a freight
cost related to the distance between your department store and the seaport.

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The quality and brand of the products are represented as numbers.
Since brands of imported goods are probably unknown to local
buyers, their brand ratings are always zero unless you arrange some
advertising for them.

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The overall rating is calculated based on the price, quality
and brand rating. Low price, high quality, and a high brand rating
assure a high overall rating.

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The overall rating is displayed here as an indicator. Each
portion represents a different aspect of the product and their
combined rating becomes the overall rating of the product. The
yellow portion represents the price attractiveness of the
product, the green portion represents its quality, and the orange
portion represents its brand rating.

It seems that you could simply pick the product with the highest
overall rating. But you must consider other factors, such as the
freight cost, demand of the product in your city, and the
products offered by your competitors. We will discuss each of
these factors, but right now let's just pick a product to keep
things moving along.

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mouse : left single
Click the "Link" button to establish a purchase link with the
supplier. This tells your purchasing unit to buy this product.

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Your staff is now preparing to take delivery of the goods from the supplier.

In Capitalism, you only need to tell the purchasing unit which
product you want to buy. Your staff will keep purchasing the
product until the supply of the product is no longer available.

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Currently, the goods you have ordered are still on their way to
your department store.

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action: next_day
Now they are being unloaded...

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action: enable_next_day
This area shows the load of the product in the unit. Each box
represents one cargo of the product. Each cargo can store a
number of units of the product. The number of units a cargo can
hold varies from product to product. For large expensive
products, such as cars, one cargo can hold only a few units of
the product, whereas for smaller, lower-cost products, such as
shampoo, one cargo can hold up to several thousand units. This
makes the total value of all cargoes of all types of products
about the same.

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Now, the goods are moving to the sales unit from the purchasing
unit. Once the goods reach the sales unit, you are in the retail
business.

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mouse : left single
To find out sales information for the product, click the
Information button.

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This browser shows products that are being sold in the department
store. At the sides of each product picture, there are several
bar and line indicators. By reading these indicators, you find
out how well the product is selling.

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Underneath the picture of the product, there are two horizontal
lines. The upper blue one is the supply line and the lower red
one is the demand line. Since the product has just been launched
into the market, there isn't much demand yet. Thus, the red
line is extremely short and looks like a small dot.

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If the supply line is longer than the demand line, the supply of
the product is more than the demand. This implies that the
product's profitability might not be fully exploited yet. It has
the capacity to meet more demand and generate more revenue.

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Conversely, if the demand line is longer than the supply line,
this indicates that the firm is not able to supply enough goods
to meet the demand. In this situation, try to lift the supply,
because any additional supply will be turned into sales.

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When your product begins to gain ground in the market, you see a
red vertical bar showing the market share of the current product
in the city. If the length of the bar is close to its maximum,
your product is dominating the market in this city.

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Another indicator you see here is the brand owner indicator.
It shows the corporate color of the brand owner of each product.

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The sale information for the highlighted product in the browser
is shown here. Three types of graphs are available: revenue,
quantity sold and gross profit. Select the graph you want to see
by pressing the appropriate button above the graph.

action : disable_next_day
You now have a basic understanding of how a department store
operates and have set up a sound one.

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mouse : right single
However, to survive in a highly competitive market, you must
understand the market status of your company, as well as where
your competitors stand. To help you, Capitalism has several
market analysis tools. The first one you should examine is the
product detail report.

Right-click on the product picture to display it, now.

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Here is the product detail report. First, let's look
at the product browser. It lists all products of the same
type currently being sold in the city, including yours and those
of your competitors. The price, quality rating, and brand rating
of each product are shown. To get more information about a
specific product, simply highlight it in the browser.

You then see the details related to price, brand, and quality
displayed in the lower section of the report. These data
may seem complicated, but they are just a condensed form
of what you will learn in later lessons on manufacturing
and advertising. For now, we will ignore these items.

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In the upper part of the report, there are two graphs. The left
one shows the combined sales of the current product type in the
current city over the past 12 months, while the right one shows
the sales of the highlighted product only.

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In the default setting, revenue data are shown in the graphs.
If you click the "Qty Sold Graph" button, then quantity sold
data are displayed instead.

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To the right of the graphs are a pair of pie charts. The
left one shows each producer's share in the market and the right
one shows each retailer's share in the market. You can identify
the owning corporation by the color of the pie sections. The white
section represents the combined market share of all local
competitors in the city.

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As just mentioned, there are local competitors in each city.
Although their firms are not shown in the game map, they do
compete directly with corporations in the game. Sometimes they
may even be the major competing force in the market.

You can refer to this area for the average price, quality rating,
brand rating, and overall rating of the goods that the local
competitors in the city are selling.

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Next to the information about the local competitors, you see the
average price, quality rating, brand rating, and overall rating of
all products from both corporations and local competitors. By
comparing your numbers to the averages, you get an overview of
your competitive position in the city.

When consumers buy a product, they usually consider several
factors. The three most important factors are price, quality, and
brand. The importance of these three factors, however, varies from product
to product. For example, when buying a pair of sport shoes, a
consumer is concerned more about the brand than the price. In
contrast, when buying a piece of frozen meat, a consumer is
usually concerned more about the price and less about the brand.

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Based on this consumer behavior, the game assigns a set of
predefined values to each product. These are "price concern,"
"quality concern", and "brand concern". They are shown as
percentages; their sum is always 100%. For example, when a
consumer is buying a product with 50% price concern, 30% quality
concern, and 20% brand concern, the foremost criterion in the
consumer's selection is price, with quality second and brand
last.

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You may have noticed that these concern numbers are also shown on
the top of the browser, next to their descriptions. This lets you
get a quick glimpse of the concern numbers while you are reading
the information in the browser.

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Another important number is the necessity index. A high
index value means that the product is necessary to people in their
daily life. The demand for necessary goods is fairly constant, as
people must buy them even if the value they offer is not attractive.
The attractiveness of a product is represented by its overall rating.

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In contrast, the demand for non-necessary goods is strongly
influenced by the attractiveness of the goods. Thus, sometimes,
cutting price does not result in reduced profit, as it can
stimulate the demand. The increased demand may more than
offset the reduced profit margin.

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This report also allows you to look at the market information for other
cities. You can select a city you are interested in from this list.
The population of each city is shown next to the city name in
brackets.

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mouse : left single
The product summary report slows much the same information, but on
several products at a time. It is useful when you want general
information on several products at once, rather than all the information
on a single product. Let's look at that report now.

Click here to display it.

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This report has a lot in common with the product detail
report. The most obvious similarity is the sales graph. It shows
the combined sales of the current product type in the current
city over the past 12 months, just like the one in the product
detail report.

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The pie charts are also no different from those in the product
detail report. The left one shows each producer's share of the
market and the right one tells each retailer's share of the
market.

There are several additional features in this report. One of the
most useful features is display filtering. You can control the
types of products listed in the report by setting the display
filters. There are four display filters in this report.

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The first filter is the "Product Availability Filter." If you set it
to "Has Trade Sales," the report shows only products that are
available in the trading market, non-finished goods. If you set it to
"Has Retail Sales," then only products that currently have corporate
retail sales are displayed.

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The second filter is the "Product Category Filter." Set it to
"Consumer Goods" to show only consumer goods. Set it to
"Industrial Goods" to show only industrial goods.

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The third filter is the "Corporation Filter."  If this filter is set
to a specific corporation instead of "All" corporations, the
report will list only those products that are being produced or
retailed by that corporation.

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The final filter is the "City Filter." If this filter is set to "All
Cities," the report shows the combined sales of the listed products
in all cities. If it is set to a specific city, then only the
sales information of that specific city will be shown. It also shows the
population of each city next to the city name.

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To browse through the data, use the scroll bar or click
the body area of the browser. If you click the upper half of the
body area, the browser scrolls up. Likewise, if you click the
lower half of the body area, the browser scrolls down.

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The product picture itself is a hyper-text button. Click the button
to display its product detail report.

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mouse : left single
Okay, it's time to go back to your department store.

Click here to close the report.

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After reading the reports, you may need to take some actions to
compete successfully in the market. You can react to competition
by adjusting the selling price of your products. To change the
selling price of a product use the "New Price" spinner and press
the "Confirm" button to confirm the change.


Price cutting is probably not the best way to outperform your
competitors. In future tutorials you will learn many new ways to
enhance the sales of your products. Take some time to review what you
have just learned and when you are ready move on to the more advanced
tutorials.